Earlier today I read a blog post entitled “The best things and stuff of 2020” by Fogus. I liked the format so much that I decided to steal it, imitation being the greatest form of flattery and all that.

Great blog-posts / articles read

An exploration of how some microcontrollers marketed for low power e-ink displays aren’t actually suitable for low power tasks: TTGO T5 2.9inch e-Ink display with ESP32 MCU and the follow up

I never thought I’d be entertained by an analysis of maps, but I enjoyed Apple’s New Map, Expansion #7: Final Parts of the Continental U.S.

foone’s exploration of digital pregnancy tests, culminating in this video

Another fun one from foone

Most viewed blog posts by me

I have no idea, but since I’ve only written 2 I have a decent chance of guessing correctly. This might inspire me to set up analytics here…

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

N/A

Favorite non-technical books read

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchet 1

Delta-V by Daniel Suarez

The Two Moons by James P Hogan

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

Number of books published

0

Number of books written

0

Number of books read

19

Number of blog posts written

2 2

Miles ridden on my bike

263 miles recorded in Strava, probably ~400 overall

Miles driven in my car

2,5863

Miles driven in other people’s cars

1,178 (on a weeklong work trip in New Mexico shortly before the pandemic)

Favorite musicians discovered

Molchat Doma

The Coup

Mazzy Star

Yeasayer

Favorite films/shows discovered

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

The Prisoner (the TV show)

Escape from New York & John Carpenter’s Escape From L.A. (more topical to current events than I expected in 2020)

Knives Out

Favorite games discovered

Virtual reality games:

Pistol Whip: An incredibly fun VR game that I purchased to help remain active during quarantine. It’s a first person shooter and a rhythm game. That sounds like an odd combination of genres but it works really well. The marketing for the game talks about how it’ll make you feel like John Wick, and they’re accurate. The devs have also added a lot of content after release, including a slightly bizarre but fun campaign mode.

ControlTowerVR: The Oculus Quest has a surprisingly large ecosystem of games that aren’t available on the official store. ControlTowerVR is one of my favorites. It reminds me of the time when smartphones were just starting to become popular and before gacha/microtransactions became prevalent. IMO that was a golden age of smartphone gaming. Developers were still figuring out how to use hardware like accelerometers and touchscreens in interesting ways, and monetization was a lot less obnoxious. One briefly popular genre during this time was sim-Air Traffic Controller games. In these games, players used the touchscreen to draw flight paths for airplanes so that they could land without crashing into each other at increasingly busy airports. ControlTowerVR takes that concept and upgrades it into 3-D. It’s not a polished game, but the core gameplay is really fun and relaxing.

Pancake games:

Golf With Your Friends: A miniature golf game that really shines when played with 3+ friends. Initially got the Microsoft store version for free, but purchased on Steam because the Microsoft version lacks custom maps.

Mount and Blade: Bannerlord: Still a work in progress, but it seems to be a worthy successor to Warband. Sieges have a lot more replayability, although some of the systems that the predecessor had for emergent gameplay haven’t been implemented yet so it can still be a bit of a slog when the battles get old. I’m also a big fan of the developers, who were incredibly kind at E3 a few years ago.

Blood Bowl: Probably the best football videogame since NCAA ‘14.

Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with

Ruby: I love the syntax so much that I keep coming up with excuses to write something in Ruby

Python: I don’t particularly love it as a language, but the ecosystem is really strong and there’s TONS of quality libraries out there. That makes it super easy to mash up APIs in fun ways. I’ve been working on a goofy Reddit bot that I’ll probably write a post or two about in the coming weeks4.

I’ve also been playing with e-ink displays (which inspired me to buy a Kindle). I’m using one of these microcontrollers with an eink display in conjunction with this soil moisture sensor to try and keep myself from killing my plants. Right my setup only lasts about a day on battery (averaging ~50 milliamps), but I’d like to see if I can stretch that out to a few weeks or months.

Programming languages used for work-related projects

Mostly Java, C++, and SQL.

Programming languages (and related) that I hope to explore more deeply

Dart (especially Flutter)

Zig

ESP-32 ULP assembly

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

SPACETRACK REPORT NO. 3: Models for Propagation of NORAD Element Sets

BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security

Still haven’t read…

The copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach I’ve had for years.

I started Gravity’s Rainbow, but gave up. Maybe I’ll give it another shot in 2021.

Favorite technical conference attended

N/A

Favorite code read

To be honest, nothing really stands out off the top of my head.

Life-changing technology “discovered”

Lots of Google specific technologies:

Maybe not lifechanging, but I played with Wav2Lip and learned how easy it can be to create certain types of deepfakes (a great party-trick)

State of plans from 2020

2020 was a mess overall, but not as bad as it could’ve been for accomplishing my goals

✅ Read more books

✅ Visit more national parks

✅ Get a plant

✅ Get another plant after I kill the first one

✅ Controls tens of thousands of pounds of very expensive hardware with a $30 Xbox controller

✅ Write review of McDonald’s that I visited in Canada

❌ Spend more time hanging out with friends I don’t see as often

❌ Ski in winter

❌ Scuba dive in summer

❌ International vacation (fortunately COVID hit before this made it past the planning stage)

❌ Write reviews of McDonald’s that I visited in Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, and Ireland

Plans for 2021

In general, take things one day at a time

I’d like to build an IoT device that lasts a useful amount of time on battery. Ideally I can incorporate some tricks to extend the battery life of my plant soil sensor.

Write more blog posts. One per month seems like a reasonable goal, and supposedly it gets easier once you’ve gotten a few under your belt

More bike riding

Waste less time

  1. I’ve tried getting into the Discworld series a few times with limited success. This time, I decided to not read the books chronologically and to skip to a later one. I’m glad I did. The first few in the series are not my cup of of tea, but this one was. ↩︎

  2. But I started writing 5 blog posts last year ↩︎

  3. From 46,505 to 49,091 ↩︎

  4. Putting that in writing will hopefully be good motivation to sit down and actually write ↩︎

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